That brought back other memories of Manuel and Arlen Green and Bob Hughes and Bill Downing and Pepe de la Fuente and Frank Hsu and a host of other rowdies we used to run with, and a Thanksgiving weekend when I took Butch to my hometown and introduced him to my pretty sister, and the good club steaks we used to get at the Alcazar in Juarez for just a dollar. When we ran out of friends and started remembering frat rats and beauty queens whose names we could no longer bring to the surface, Butch said, “You always wanted to write, didn’t you? Even back in those days.”
“Yeah,” I said, “And you always wanted to ride in rodeos.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but they’re old-timer rodeos now. So tell me what you’ve been doing for the past quarter-century.”
We talked of schools andjobs and marriages and divorces and remarriages. He told me of his wanderings in New Mexico and West Texas and as far afield as South Carolina, and I countered with my adventures in Massachusetts and Missouri and Oklahoma and Alabama and Kentucky. We spoke of sons, and how proud we are of them. Eventually we made a U-turn and went back to the farther past, when we were young and knew each other.
“Ah, those were the days,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want to repeat any of them.”
He was right. Wanting your youth back, I decided, is a whole lot sadder than losing it.
May, 1980
How Much an Inch of Rain Is Worth
A FELLOW WHO RUNS a small farming and ranching operation near Marfa told me the other day that a one-inch rain would be worth forty thousand dollars to him if it fell within the next two weeks. If it fell after that, it wouldn’t be worth much of anything, he said, because his cattle already would be sold and his crops already burned up.
On the off chance that rain might come, the man’s two teen-age sons were sleeping days and tending the crops at night—a routine they had established to avoid being killed by the sun in their bell pepper fields. In a week or so they will find out whether their efforts were worth forty thousand dollars or nothing.
That forty-thousand-dollar figure puts Texas’ current killer drought into a truer perspective than the estimated loss figures reported by government officials and the news media, I think. When State Agriculture Commissioner Reagan Brown tells President Carter that Texas agriculture losses are approaching two billion dollars, the president may be impressed, but the figure doesn’t mean much to most of us. Nobody but the federal government and the Hunt brothers knows how much money two billion dollars is. The figure slides through the ordinary mind without grabbing onto anything, like the number of miles to the sun. An hour after we read it, we can’t remember whether it was two billion or four billion or seven billion. It was just a big, incomprehensible number, similar to estimates of the amount said to be wasted by the federal bureaucracy every month or two.
Most people have some idea how much forty thousand dollars is, though, and what it can buy and what it means to a family of six who have worked for it all year and have counted on getting it and probably won’t get it because the rain waited too long to fall or didn’t fall at all.
It’s such modest figures that have so many rural Texans frightened and dredging up old memories of the long, horrible 1950s, when the rain fell on neither the just nor the unjust in Texas and huge regions of the state began to resemble Saudi Arabia.
A lot of family ranches and farms disappeared down the gullets of the big agribusiness corporations during that decade, and a lot of young people who had hoped to spend their lives on their own land, growing beef and pork and vegetables and grain as their forefathers had done, migrated to the cities to manufacture and sell underarm deodorants and Frisbees and aluminum siding for somebody else.
After a generation or two away from the farm, we tend to forget the true significance of rain. When it’s hot in Dallas, we spend more time in the air-conditioning and worry about the electric bill. When it doesn’t rain, we water the lawn more often and worry about the water bill. When a Fort Stockton rancher tells a TV reporter that he’s selling his cattle at a loss because the grass is gone and he can’t afford to buy feed for them, we think, “Too bad for him.” When the farmers of Dilley, the self-styled “Watermelon Capital of the World,” report that there will be no Dilley watermelons this summer because they’ve burned up in the fields, we think, “I’m glad I’m not a watermelon farmer.” When we drive through the Davis Mountains, which should be green at this time of year, and see that the grass is short and the color of sand and that thousands of acres of even that meager forage have been blackened by fires set by rainless lightning and careless tourists, we complain that the scenery isn’t as pretty as it’s supposed to be.
Although many will never recognize it for what it is, the real meaning of this drought will creep into the city sooner or later. It’s already creeping, here and there. It wasn’t entirely because of inflation that a friend of mine paid five dollars at the Dallas farmer’s market the other day for a watermelon just big enough to feed three. It was because it didn’t rain at Dilley. And next fall, when there’s a shortage of beef and the price of hamburger goes up, it’ll be because it didn’t rain in South and West Texas.
Then the city folks who manufacture cars and appliances and clothing and sporting goods will notice that they’re selling less than they hoped to, and they’ll lay off some of their employees. And they’ll cuss the government or the banks or somebody else for their bad year. But it’ll be because it didn’t rain in time, or enough, or at all.
And eventually the scholars and the government statisticians will discover that the number of family farmers and ranchers—the group of independent gamblers and entrepreneurs who used to be called “the backbone of the nation”—is dwindling even faster than before, that more of the country’s land has fallen into fewer hands, that there are more people working for fewer bosses, that more of the nation’s wealth—including its economic and political power— is possessed by fewer owners.
“Give us rain,” the old Texans used to say, “and it don’t matter who’s in the White House.”
They knew what was really important, even in an election year.
July, 1980
On Burros and Gentle Understanding
MY FEELINGS ARE HURT. Not only was I not appointed head honcho of the great burro roundup, I wasn’t even invited to participate. The so-called elite corps of cowboys chosen for the job sneaked off to the Grand Canyon without me.
It’s the fault of the Fund for Animals folks, probably. They’re the people who came up with the idea of rounding up the Grand Canyon’s wild burros and putting them up for adoption after federal officials said the beasts were depriving other wildlife of food and were tearing up the scenic grandeur of the place. The feds were planning to shoot the burros, which sounds like a pretty good idea to anyone who has known a burro personally. And adopting a burro— especially a wild one—makes about as much sense as planting a mesquite or a loco weed in your front yard.
But on the off chance that a future generation might find some redeeming social value in wild burros, I was willing to offer my expertise to the Fund for Animals for a reasonable fee so that the work would be done properly. Instead, the fund gave the bossing job to Dave Ericsson, another Texan whose only credentials are that he’s a former world champion bronc rider and has captured about seventeen hundred wild burros throughout the Southwest during the past two summers. The rest of the crew probably is even more amateurish.
And no wonder. Cia Hobbs, press liaison for the Fund for Animals, says Ericsson and his crew were chosen for their “gentleness.” “The absolute most primary concern, because the burros are not accustomed to man, is to handle them in such a way that they are not frightened,” said Ms. Hobbs. She also praised Ericsson for his “fantastically gentle understanding” of the critters.
I believe Ms. Hobbs has confused burros with bunny rabbits. No wild burro of my acquaintance ever possessed such a sensitive, easily damaged psyche.
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sp; And I knew several. Wild burros wandered the streets of Fort Davis when I was a boy, and Jimmie Granger and George Medley and I used to round them up on Saturdays for our rodeos on the Grangers’ vacant lot. Lacking the helicopters and other fancy equipment that Ericsson and his amateurs are using, we never managed to capture more than two out of the herd of five or six on any given Saturday, but our rodeos featured only one event—bareback bronc riding—and two burros were sufficient to provide as many cracked heads, cut knees, and bruised rumps as we needed.
The two who stick in my mind like grassburrs are the beasts we named Dynamite and Lightning. We captured them more often than the others because, I suspect, they had grown fond of damaging small boys. After we had chased the herd a mile or two up some dusty road, trying to lasso the burros with our cotton ropes, Dynamite and Lightning would give each other a wink and just stop and wait for us to loop them and lead them to the Grangers’ lot. Once inside the arena, we would fashion Dynamite’s lead rope into a makeshift hackamore and slip it over his nose, and the first daredevil would climb aboard.
We used Dynamite for the preliminary competition because he was a slow starter. While the tense rider sat astride him, the other rodeo hands would shake tin cans filled with rocks and whack Dynamite with yucca poles. Once Jimmie even set off a firecracker under his belly. Dynamite, however, never moved until he was ready, and sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would pass without so much as a twitch.
Meanwhile, the rider would be getting restless, because Dynamite was famous for his backbone, which resembled a picket fence. Straddling it for fifteen minutes was pure torture, and sooner or later the rider would have to raise his rump off the sharp vertebrae to ease the pain. At that moment, Dynamite’s hind hooves would fly skyward, and the rider would sail between the burro’s ears into the dust. To top off the indignity, Dynamite would bare his long, yellow teeth and loose the most derisive bray ever to insult the ears of man.
Lightning, who was reserved for the finals, didn’t share Dynamite’s sense of humor. His calling in life was to bloody as many small boys as possible, which he accomplished most often by commencing his performance before anybody else was ready. As soon as one of us tried to boost a rider to his back, Lightning would step on the foot of the booster, causing him to cry out and drop the rider. Or he would fall down and pin the rider under him. Or he would start bucking before the rider was firmly seated.
For a while, we tried to prevent these disasters by “earing down” Lightning while the rider climbed on deck, but his ears were stronger than our hands, and he always shook free and bit us. On the infrequent occasions when a rider actually got astride him, Lightning always made a beeline for the barbed wire fence and scraped him off.
On no occasion do I remember Dynamite or Lightning being frightened or in need of gentle understanding. But that was a long time ago, and maybe wild burros have changed since then. Kids certainly have.
July, 1980
A Chance Encounter in a Dark Park
I WAS SITTING ALONE on a bench in the small park near my house the other night. People rarely go there at night, maybe because there are no lights, so it’s a nice place to spend a cool evening alone when you’re in the mood to ponder sailing ships and sealing wax and such. It was that kind of evening—the temperature had dropped below ninety—and I was in that kind of mood.
I had been sitting there for some time when this guy ran past me out of nowhere. He ran maybe twenty yards across the lawn, then fell to his hands and knees and made choking and moaning sounds. I thought he had been beaten up or stabbed or was suffering a seizure of some kind. Just as I was about to get up and go to him, another figure ran past. This one was a girl. She knelt beside the guy and said, “Let me help you.”
“No,” he said.
“Aw, come on,” she said. “Let me help you.”
The guy got up and took off across the lawn again and disappeared into the darkness down by the playground. The girl watched him a minute, then turned and saw me sitting on the bench. “Is he all right?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, he’s just sick,” she said. “We’ve been in a bar all evening, and he had a little too much to drink. He’ll be all right.”
I expected her to scat like a deer then. I would have, if I were a young woman and a stranger sitting alone on a bench in the dark, empty park spoke to me. Instead, she came over and sat down beside me. “It’s hard to tell a fellow he’s drinking too much,” she said. “He’s not used to it.”
“How come you’re out here?” I asked.
“We were on our way to a party a couple of blocks from here, and he got sick,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Just thinking,” I said.
“Thinking,” she said. “That’s neat.”
By and by her friend returned and joined us on the bench. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, either. “Hi,” he said. He was feeling okay, now, and soon the three of us were chatting like old friends on a porch swing. Somehow school became the topic, and both said they had just graduated. “From where?” I asked. The boy named a well-known Dallas private high school. “You’re younger than I thought,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll be registering for the draft soon,” the boy said. “I hate to think of it.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I had to register once. Almost every man alive has, I guess.”
“Were you scared?”
“A little. I never had to go, though.”
“Boy, I hope I’m that lucky. What do you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Really? That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking of becoming,” he said. “An author. But I may go into business or the law. How do you decide?”
“Well, if you’re lucky, it doesn’t take long to find out what you do best,” I said. “Or what you like to do best.”
He was going to the University of Texas at Austin, he said, and his girl was going to the University of Arkansas. “I guess we’ll meet at football games,” he said.
“It’s funny,” the girl said. “We all hated high school, but now that we’re splitting up, it’s kind of sad. That’s what this party’s about. It’s supposed to be a birthday party for the guy who’s giving it, but it’s really a last fling for the old high school gang. Who knows when we’ll ever get together again.”
I thought of my own high school bunch, twenty-five years ago. We never got together again. Some of them are sending their own kids off to college. Some of them are dead. “You should go to that party,” I said.
“Are you ready to go?” the girl asked her friend.
“I’m going to sit here a while longer,” he said. “You go ahead.”
They had arrived in a car, it turned out. She walked out to the street and got in it and drove away. “I haven’t met many authors,” the boy said. “Do they make much money?”
“The chances are better in business and law,” I said.
“I’m not sure I could write anyway,” he said. “I can’t imagine writing a book. Hey, would you like to come to our party? You might get a kick out of it— meeting the new high school generation, you know.”
We walked around the corner to a big house at the end of the block, and around the house to the back yard. Several kids were splashing in a huge swimming pool there, and rock music was booming over a stereo. My new friend introduced me to a group around the beer keg. “Do you know how to get beer out of a keg?” one of the girls asked.
“Yes, I’ve done it a time or two,” I said.
The kids hadn’t seen each other since graduation, which seemed a long time ago to them, and they greeted each other with a kind of seriousness. As they talked of college and vague career plans and the draft, they seemed to realize—though maybe only half-consciously—that their lives already were moving apart, that there would never be another night like this.
I began to feel sad, too, for these polite young strangers of the new high school generation, who weren’t very
different from all the old high school generations. After my first beer I went home, glad I didn’t have to do it all over again.
August, 1980
Who’s Buried in Lee Oswald’s Grave?
UNTIL ROBERT OSWALD got his temporary restraining order the other day, medical examiners and funeral directors were gearing up to answer the question that has intrigued us all for so long: Who the heck is buried in Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave?
When a casket was buried there, everybody assumed Lee Harvey Oswald was in it. But we assumed a lot of things in 1963. We assumed that Oswald shot John Kennedy and that Jack Ruby shot Oswald and that Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and that Oswald was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth.
We assumed these things because the FBI said so, the Secret Service said so, the Dallas Police Department said so, the doctors who performed the autopsies said so, the Warren Commission said so. We even saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV. We believed that’s what we were seeing, anyway, because the networks said that’s what it was. And a jury in Dallas decided that Ruby shot Oswald and sentenced him to the electric chair, but his conviction was reversed and he reportedly died of cancer while awaiting a new trial. We assumed the man shot by Oswald was really Kennedy and that the man who was said to be Oswald was really Oswald and that the man who shot him was really Ruby and that all these men were really buried. We assumed the man said to be J. D. Tippit, who was said to be a Dallas policeman, also was shot by the man said to be Oswald, and that he also was buried.
How naive we were.
We’ve learned since then that some people in government tell lies. Therefore, isn’t it reasonable to assume that all people in government tell lies? And if they tell lies sometimes, isn’t it reasonable to assume they lie all the time? Therefore, isn’t it reasonable to assume that everything we were told about Kennedy and Oswald and Ruby and Tippit was a lie?
The Time of My Life Page 15